At the start of the game with the poison and health regeneration debuff of toxicity, Slither is one of the best, if not the best harassing heroes in the game. When put in combination with his Poison Spray, for increased damage over time and a movement speed debuff Slither can easily assure very early kills allowing him to get much needed gold. Once Slither hits level 6 and has his ultimate he can deal large amounts of damage to entire teams. Although his ultimate damage is non-lethal, in combination with toxicity and poison spray kills are quite guaranteed even if you do die before hand.

Starting with 2 pretender's crowns, 2 sets of runes of blight, and a mana pot allow you to last hit well, while having the health and mana regeneration to continuously harass with toxicity and poison spray despite his low attack range. Picking up a quick boots, and making those pretender's crowns into soul scream rings gives him the damage and move speed to get level 3-5 kills in a lane with another burst damage dealer or stunner. After that, a null stone grants the health and mana regeneration needed to stay in the fight constantly, and be able to use poison spray freely. Frostburn is the next recommended pick up, granting both damage, increased move speed, and the slow that was taken away from toxicity many patches ago. After these items you are fairly set to take on anything, however if the game continues after this point Wingbow provides good damage and survivability against heroes without Savage mace. From there continue stacking damage with items like your own savage mace, or rift shards and auto attack through entire teams.

As with all guides posted here, these are meant for skilled players with teammates that know this different style of play and are capable of playing with you in a hyper aggressive fashion, please do not attempt with random Public teams. If you would like for me to make these video guides instead please leave a comment below.

- In celebration of the Lunar New Year we will be adding special limited edition Pharaoh Alt Avatar - Golden Emperor!
* He will only be available from 12:00 AM EST 1/27/2012 through 8:00 02/03/2012!
- Also in celebration of the Year of the Dragon you will find a new Year of the Dragon Icon available for purchase!

- Fixed an issue causing some users in large clans to suffer periodic hitches.
- Creeps sounds tweaked and generally lowered in volume
- host_timescale gets reset when disconnecting from a practice game
- You can no longer spectate or mentor someone who is already spectating or mentoring

Kongor
- Gold received for getting the last hit on Kongor normalized from 300-400 to 350

Towers
- Gold received for getting the last hit on Towers normalized from 452-470,502-520,552-570,602-620 to 460,510,560,610

Structure Gold (Meatball/Huts)
- Gold received for getting the last hit on a Structure normalized from 102-120 to 110

Gemini
- Fixed Twin Fangs playing through fog
- Fire and Ice now gain 80/90/100% of stats from Gemini
- The wolves from Fire and Ice now have their movespeed set to Gemini's
- Fixed a rare anomaly where Gemini would go in a random direction when recombining from split form
- Fixed Gemini's split form Fire Fang & Ice Fang so they get stunned properly while bound to the projectile
- Removed invulnerability from Fire Fang and Ice Fang while bound to the projectile
- Fixed Fire and Ice assist mechanic to function properly

Geomancer
- Dig no longer usable while Immobilized
- Can use Items while in Dig
- Crystal Field decreased time till explosion from 3 to 3/2.75/2.5

Monarch
- Starting Armor reduced from 2.1 to 1.1
- Starting Movespeed from 300 to 295
- Crippling Pollen reduced cast range from 600 to 550
* This is listed as 500 in the in-game client. It should be 550.
- Fixed the last second of Crippling Pollen so that the slow doesn't go through magic immunity

Aluna: Fixed Deja Vu's 3rd activation from playing through fog
Arachna: Scripting optimized
Artesia: Made her Arcane Missile slow transferable via Parasite
Balphagore: Optimized Corpse Conversion corpse detection slightly
Behemoth: Fixed Fissure so you can't tab to the invisible gadgets
Bombardier: Scripting optimized
Bubbles: Shell Surf now spawns 50 units closer to him so it hits units right in front of him
Bubbles: Fixed Kelp Field from playing in fog
Chipper: Rockets Barrage touch changed from Physical to Magic
Chipper: Scripting optimized
Corrupted Disciple: Scripting optimized
The Dark Lady: Touched up a few animations
Devourer: Made Devour give assists properly if it did no damage
Drunken Master: Scripting optimized
Empath: Fixed As One from playing in fog
Engineer: Scripting optimized
Gravekeeper: Minor fix to Illusions
Kraken: Fixed a bug where the target's corpse stands up after death if they died while bound to Tsunami Charge
Lord Salforis: Fixed Life Tap playing through fog
Martyr: Fixed up the Alt Avatar's sounds when casting abilities
Master of Arms: Shrunk blue attack projectile effects slightly on towers
Parasite: Fixed up some weird interactions when he is inside a creep
Parasite: Fixed him so he is correctly disarmed when inside a creep
Pyromancer: Burning! now capped at 127 charges
Rhapsody: Fixed up her model and the weird animations going on
Scout: Fixed Detonate ability (for both Scout & Electric Eyes) so they can be used while stunned as well
Shadowblade: Soul's Sight bonus damage no longer propogates to Illusions
Succubus: Made Succubus' Hold give assists properly if it did no damage
Torturer: Minor fix to Torment's interaction when multiple items used on him at once
Wretched Hag: Animation smoothing on Wretched Hottie
Zephyr: Scripting optimized

In the way of items there were only a few major things, first was the change to Helm of the Black Legion, which was in my view entirely necessary as it was becoming a go to item for way too many heroes. The other was a nerf to Sol's Bulwark, I am more on the fence of this one as Sol's was meant to be a stepping stone to Daemonic however some players were getting one of both negative and positive. I guess I would have to agree on that notion although it is more of a "fix unintended consequence" sort of thing I believe.

There was a huge number of hero changes and I will only touch on those that I think are most important here. First the change to Flux's magnetic surge, which was accidentally temporarily in game a few patches ago but was hot fixed out, is definitely a great buff allowing you to pull unobservant allies out of things like Valkyrie's arrows. Geomancer received some much needed love for his ulti, which late game when all enemies had high movespeed was very trying to land. Gemini got his first change, in what I believe will be a long line of changes to come, with his ultimate form wolves not getting automatic ghost marcher move speed so he actually needs to get boots. Lord Salforis got the cast time removed on life tap which makes it much better for use on non-slowed targets early game for kills. Martyr's new Sacrificial Lamb is very interesting, I have only got to play with one Martyr since the patch, but it definitely cements his character concept of playing with low health and is incredibly strong maybe too strong. Monarch received a series of nerfs, she was indeed strong and needed some toning down, but I am fairly sure they took it too far, all she needed was the removal of sight and the decrease to pollen distance. That is all the major changes, however there were a lot more cooldown/manacost/small number changes to a lot of heroes so it is worth perusing through. Next hero guide will be coming out Saturday on Slither.

Monday, January 23, 2012

First, I am going to make the excuse that every person has at one point, between family matters and college courses I was unable to update for a very long time. However, those two semesters are now over and I am done with family drama so I come back and will update far more often. I plan on doing two hero guides a week and a video game review along with some other updates for games I am playing from now on. I also have accepted Day[9]'s new years resolution of playing three games of Starcraft 2 a day and will be recording and uploading them to my youtube, mostly to help myself learn and also if wanted I can try commentating while I play.

Gravekeeper is an intelligence hero with strong early game ganking that works well in either a solo mid or even better laned with a stun or disable for quick kills. He requires some farm to be effective and can be a powerful hero all game long. My starting items of preference are two pretender's crowns, 6 tangos, and a mana potion, then work towards Ghost Marchers, Arcana, Health tube, and 2 fortified bracers.

These items will allow you to go very long periods of time without being forced to return to the well and give decent damage and mana regeneration for spamming abilities. With these items your primary goal should be to gank whoever and whenever you can, while building up money for purchasing a hellflower and eventually null stone. Defiling touch allows you to chase heroes very effectively along with making last hitting creeps far easier and corpse toss should be leveled to 3 at level 5 in order to give both charges. Zombie Apocalypse is a great team fighting and pushing tool, either giving you a substantial increase in damage and cannon fodder when at a tower or creating madness in a fight. However, while the zombies summoned are very effective against heroes such as Swiftblade, his ultimate, or Voodoo Jester improper use can result is a quick defeat against other heroes like Behemoth or Keeper of the Forest.

Due to the strength of your abilities and the silence awarded by hellflower it is often that you are a first target in team fights for disables so that you can be killed before casting, null stone gives you the chance to get off your key abilities and silence and then auto attack away. It is very important to level your corpse toss and defiling touch early as they are your main abilities for chasing and killing enemy heroes, along with easy harassment in the laning phase. Good partner heroes I can recommend are monarch or Andromeda. While in the early game you deal a lot of your damage in magic, if you get null stone and hellflower I recommand following it up with shield breaker, the minus armor is very useful for you, your team, and all of your zombies. After that I am honestly not sure what the best luxury items are, of course since they can be very situational, but I recommend items such as Frostfield Plate, Sheep Stick, Restoration Stone, and possibly Genjuro although I have not been able to test that in an actual game.

As with all guides posted here, these are meant for skilled players with teammates that know this different style of play and are capable of playing with you in a hyper aggressive fashion, please do not attempt with random Public teams. If you would like for me to make these video guides instead please leave a comment below.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

First and foremost, Technorati here is the claim verification: 93N9XFNJCMWA. So now my blog will be visible in a proper blog directory website. Now on to business.

Dragon Age 2, a review.

Now at the start of this I will begin to say that I have not completed the game, so far I have only been able to devote about 15 hours to it and I am very much so a completionist so am only partway through act 2. Now the very first impressions I got when playing the game were something along these lines, "Oooo its nice and shiny, and wow it has this mass effect dialogue system I really liked." However, I noticed that excitement started to dwindle quickly. Don't get me wrong they did a lot of things right, but since they still changed even more they made quite a few mistakes also. The game-play, at least from what I heard since I only played a mage, is incredibly different from 1 starting class to another. Thats good, it gives the game replay value, or at least some as that replay value gets destroyed by other "features." The quick paced battles were actually quite fun as a mage, bombarding people with fist of the maker, pulling them in and then launching a fireball into their faces. There was one incredibly glaring problem with the game-play though and that was the quests, there were more than enough quests, the game was actually overflowing with them which is good because it gives more play time right? Wrong, the actual size of the game world was so small that stuffing so many quests inside is just bad, they never really change anything about the game world and the few places that exist for only one quest are just copy-pasted other dungeons and in the end felt like they were just trying to stuff in everything they could.

The story, this here was where I felt the major let down. The story in a sense just meanders about for most of the game. At the beginning you were going for a deep roads expedition, and I am like "Wooo that should be awesome, slaughtering endless waves of dark spawn while I hunt for treasure for the main story line." Well, that did not exactly go the way I had hoped. Then in Act 2 the story is about an uprising, which still is not the main plot point, and finally Act 3 is a battle between Templar and Mages. This was the major weakness of the game, mostly due to its sequel status. It just did not have its own defined story. The first game had a great one, last the Grey Warden, and a Blight all your own. Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, had just going about doing nothing major and finishing the first games story of the Chantry against the Mages, although on a completely different continent so I don't see the connection there.

Overall, I see no proper replay value in the game. At first I thought it would have some, because people commented to me before I got it on how different the classes played, but it was completely overshadowed by the lacking story and over packed quests. I still enjoyed it though, it was a nice hack and slash, good graphics, and I personally liked the interface better than the first along with the ability trees. Even the armor system I found better, not having to really worry about your companions armor as they can't switch their main clothes and just concentrating on yourself freed up plenty of space in your backpack for carrying junk to sell. So in the end it was fun, but I most definitely won't be playing it a second time.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Now, I am sure at least some of you guys that read this are programmers, and since it was asked of me in an interview I would like to hear what you guys would respond with. The question was, "What is the most innovative or creative idea you have ever programmed?" Now let me explain my answer and thought process.

In Fallout 3 I did a number of very interesting ideas, I implemented an Oblivion-esque magic system, however this was not terribly innovative since all it called for was a global value for the current mana levels, a slight rework of the wait/fast-travel system for that time to count towards mana regeneration, and spells were basically explosion effects with an invisible projectile.

So I did not use this, my second thought for an answer was my, not working terribly well, RTS system. Due to the limitations of the engine I never got it properly working as it crashed after a certain point due to memeory usage, usually when you had a sizable base. But it did offer the ability to build your own base from scratch, raise an army and use a squad based combat system for fighting larger battles.

The final idea, and the one I answered with was a single weapon I made for Fallout 3 with interesting physics effects, called the Railway Rifle X-treme, something anyone who has played my mod is familiar with. Now I presented this with the basis behind its working for its innovation, as it technically fired a projectile that moved 4 lightyears in distance every in game second. Since no engine could actually allow that and trying to make it function would make a physics engine programmer cry I used a work-around. I built a make-shift hitscan function, and when this function started the entire game froze at its time giving a temporal distortion effect for realism and allowing all processor usage in computing. Now this function created the projectile technically already inside whatever it hit, so before the gun had fired the projectile had already hit its target, and when the game restarted the projectile left the weapon and moved to the already in place hit. However, it also had its faults in that you had to hit something. If you missed everything (firing into the sky) then the hitscan function could never find where to place the projectile, so the game restarted and the firing scripts couldn't find the ending location causing the game to use the built-in bullet functions which could not handle the projectile speed causing the game to crash.

Now my question is two part, first is whether or not you think I made the right choice of the three and the second is to include what you would have answered with, I am curious.

Friday, March 25, 2011

First of all, Sorry for not updating very much this week I was really looking forward to hear you guys responses on what I have going for the classes, but alas I have spent most of my time job searching. Don't worry though, hopefully I should be back on track with posting soon, I may squeeze out a bunch of updates this weekend. On to more fun news, another Heroes of Newerth patch and a new hero to boot.

The majority of the patch was bug fixes so I will not go over them, here is a link though http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=237418. But who cares about any of that stuff, we got ourselves a new hero.

His name be Tremble and by god if it isn't a new and improved Broodmother from DotA. Hellbourne Agility hero Tremble with an amazing 310 base movespeed.
Hon Hero Spotlight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31x4lb8eYk4&feature=player_embedded

Terrorform:
Create and tunnel through Terror Mounds. Terror Mounds grant Invisibility with a 2 second Fade Time, {15,20,25,30}% Move Speed, and {2,4,6,8} Health Regeneration. Also gain the ability to Terror Port every {120,100,80,60} seconds between Mounds.\n\nMaximum of {3,5,7,9} Terror Mounds.

He has access to the same level of Terror Form and Impalers as Tremble.

This guy has everything, he can gank well and control runes through just one level of terrorform and with impalers has excellent chasing ability. He is definitely built to have the ability to carry, and comes with some survival and healing from abilities which is nice. Most interesting is his ability to counter pushes by porting back to base. I definitely am interested in how things pan out and how the community uses him. But my recommended carry build as I shall give for every hero, is: Ghost Marchers cause that wonderful no clip - Battlefury to help farm and mana regen - not straight, probably last item to finish Symbol of Rage for the extra lifesteal - Wingbow for some damage and attack speed - Brutalizer for disabling - and Rift shards for the damage. Good luck with 'em everyone. And one last tidbit is some music I stumbled upon, Abney Park http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81jBqYs24A&feature=related try it out.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Well, it is time that I start to code the player abilities, since most of my time has been spent on the RTS element. Dynamic trading and economy also kept me working for quite a long time, but I feel that those are going along well so I am looking for opinions on the player capabilities within the game. Now there are 4 classes for your hero, the rogue, the archer, the wizard, and the warrior. Later this week I will post about specific abilities and ask for your opinions on that, but right now I want to pitch an idea about just general player management.

The Player Leveling System:

First, the player starts at level 1 and the maximum level is 26, where at each level including the first the player is allowed to choose an ability. However, since there are only 26 abilities for each class you can not choose any at any level. For levels 1-5 there are 5 abilities but by level 5 you will have all, and they continue in 5 level brackets to 25, and at 26 you get the major end all be all ability for your Lord.

Experience is fairly standard, especially since I haven't put much thought into it, you gain experience by doing actions: trading, building, combat.

Skills. The one main point that I wanted to draw attention to and ask about is not the choice of skills system, although feedback is still more than welcome about that. You get 26 skills/abilities and each of these abilities will be scalable. As you use certain abilities like shield slam or fireball you get better, so up to a point of mastery their effectiveness would increase, more damage, less energy to use. So that while your abilities are preset you get the choice in character of which abilities you focus on to define your Lord.

Please, any and all feedback and remember I will go over specific abilities later this week.

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About Me

As a kid I loved playing video games, so when I grew up I started modding video games. Now, the entire purpose of this blog, is to give me motivation in order to finish the work I'm doing in order to try and develop my own video game.

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